by Amy Young

Created on: August 25, 2010

I really expected to like this book.  After all, I have very low standards when it comes to zombie stories, and this book was being fairly substantially hyped, so I thought it would surely meet the requirements.

Yeah, well, not so much.  Kudos, though, for having scientific zombies - especially prion zombies.  I hadn't encountered that one before, only virus ones.  In fact, I don't really have any quibbles with the zombie part of the story at all.  If there'd been more zombies and less of the idiot protagonist (and, for the love of god and all things holy, no sentence fragments - what is up with that, anyway?  There are sentence fragments in a distressing number of published works lately), I would probably have liked it just fine.  Unfortunately, the protagonist is a schmuck, and I am sad that he didn't get eaten by a zombie.  It's a first-person narrative, too, which means every second I spent reading the thing was spent immersed in the guy's head.  Ugh.  (Of course, I don't like first-person narratives at the best of times, which this definitely wasn't.)

I think this was a zombie book for the action-book reader, not for the zombie-book reader, anyway.  And while I like action movies just fine, action books are definitely not for me.  Explosions?  Gunfights?  Awesome on screen, boring as all get-out to read.  And zombie stories are supposed to have a visceral component (in a non-literal sense, I mean, though there's usually quite a bit of actual viscera around, too) - they're supposed to make you care about the people who are watching their loved ones turn into mindless killing machines.  A zombie movie isn't about how big the explosions are or how many rounds of ammo you use up (though zombie video games have a component of that), and they're not about mowing down crowds of nameless zombies, either (even though there's usually some of that, too).  They're about having to shoot your best friend in the head when he suddenly starts trying to take a bite out of your arm.  Zombies are a demoralizing and deeply terrifying threat.  This version of them was distinctly underwhelming.  For this and other reasons, the book was sadly lacking in the emotional impact department, though at least it did acknowledge that its protagonist was kind of lacking in the emotional department himself.

Anyway, it's not a bad book, and if I didn't have such a thing for the zombie sub-genre I probably would have been perfectly content with it, though probably still wouldn't actively recommend it (it's the sentence fragment thing, and I'm not getting over that anytime soon).  As it is, though . . . enh.

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